Just how big is Rhode Island? How many football pitches can you fit in it? And for the Brits, how many Trafalgar Squares? This week's fires in southern California have been quantified in what to some residents of Providence may be a helpful term, but to many - well, me - is plain bewildering.
For CBS , the fires "raced across 490,000 acres, an area half the size of Rhode Island". USA Today had Rhode Island slightly larger, half of it measuring 497,000 acres, or 765 square miles, while the exaggeration-prone folk at NPR boosted the size of half of Little Rhody to "nearly 800 square miles".
All this, of course, is nothing on the 2003 fires when, as ABC helpfully reminds us, fires "charred an area the size of Rhode Island".
For the record, the "Fun, Facts and Trivia" section of the Rhode Island Government Online site tells us that the state's area is 1,212 square miles. Even my rudimentary math(s) tells me that half the size of Rhode Island has now become a mere 607 square miles. Oops! Hold on - it just got smaller. The 2000 US census lists Rhode Island's area as 1,044.93 square miles. Go figure.
